The Schaffhausen newspaper wrote about Irène Schweizer for the first time on August 17, 1957. She had just turned 16. “Jazz meeting with the Crazy Stokers. Last Saturday, the Landhaus seemed to be the meeting place for all the jazz fans in Schaffhausen. Hundreds of expectant young people filled the hall from the beginning of the concert, and crowds had to be turned away for lack of space. Some had to remain standing, while the rest left. This concert once again demonstrated the great popularity of our local jazz band. These musicians, only 17 and 18 years old, showed astounding gifts and did justice to their name, Crazy Stokers. From the first piece, ‘Pretty Little Missy,’ the group’s signature tune, the crowd was excited, and the band kept them that way the entire evening, judging by the constant bursts of spontaneous applause. Even when experiments took the upper hand over perfected skill, significant movements in the direction of modern jazz could be heard. Connoisseurs took note of, among others, the modern version of ‘Lullaby of Birdland,’ played by the young guest pianist Irène Schweizer in the style of the famous ‘block chord’ pianist Errol Garner.”
Jazz Amateurs: The Crazy Stokers
Since the age of 19, Schweizer has bought and collected jazz records. Her first ones, by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, are still in her collection today. “At the end of the 1950s, Radio Kaiser was selling the first LPs by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. At first I found Ornette Coleman pretty weird, but I still liked it. And Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things.’ I bought that one right away. You could actually buy that in Schaffhausen. Anyway, we bought every important record that came out—at that time there were four or five a year.”
She was never actually interested in attracting a lot of attention with her music. On the contrary: “We earned very little from music. The audience at our concerts in the inn were schoolmates; my whole class from school, they all came to Schaffhausen and listened. They loved it. I couldn’t stand the girls who read Bravo, listened to rock and roll, loved Elvis Presley—I thought all that was awful. For me, Dixieland and modern jazz were what I wanted to play and listen to. Back then people still danced to our music. We played a lot of private parties and there was always dancing. I still remember very clearly the time we had a well-paid gig near Schaffhausen. It was a wedding party and we drove there in a car. But I was so pissed off the entire night that I could hardly play, because it was the Friday—April 8, 1960—when Miles Davis played in the Zürich Kongresshaus with John Coltrane. It almost killed me that I had to play this wedding instead of hearing that. I would’ve loved so much to see the concert in Zürich, it was really a catastrophe.”
Crazy Stokers, March 1957: Werner Lempen, trombone; Rolf Oechslin, alto saxophone; Irène Schweizer, piano; Ruedi Lempen, trumpet; Charly Speichinger, clarinet; Paul Rodel, banjo; Dino Corchia, bass. Not visible: Herbie Velder, drums.
Schaffhausen: The Step Across the Tracks
Already as an 18-year-old, Schweizer fled the narrow conservatism of her hometown. She never returned to Schaffhausen: “The old city here, especially, is nothing but a backdrop, beautifully made up and clean. Always so clean. You hardly see anyone on the street. It’s incredibly quiet and everything is beautiful. The Bureau of Tourism calls Schaffhausen ‘The Little Paradise.’ I wanted to go out into the wide world. Here everyone knows everyone; when you went around the old city, you knew everyone you saw. It was just a hick town. But today I enjoy going back, it’s a nice city, with the Rhine, good shops, good restaurants, and some things are happening culturally.”
Writer and journalist Isolde Schaad, born in Schaffhausen in 1944, remembers hearing talk of a brilliant pianist who played at the inn. “She grew up in the inn, the innkeeper’s daughter, and she started playing there when she was quite a young girl. When I went to high school, we had only heard about her playing. At that time we hadn’t made this step across the tracks. It was like another world. And it wasn’t possible to just go there, because there weren’t any formal performances, it was just the daughter of the house who played there. She’s a few years older than I am, and I have to say that in the 1950s and 1960s Schaffhausen was really a town of strict class differences. Irène was from the working-class part of town, and I was part of the middle class. We really had no contact. I never personally met her in Schaffhausen, only later in Zürich. The petty-bourgeois establishment didn’t want to have anything to do with this wild music. But I was about to enter my wild years; I was already something of a rebel then, but I passed my university qualifying exam and went to Zürich to study. There she played in the jazz club Africana, where internationally known musicians were already appearing. Those included expatriate South Africans like Abdullah Ibrahim, who was still going by the name Dollar Brand then, and this young woman. They sat down and just played. They say that the prophet has to be recognized abroad before being appreciated at home. That’s an old pattern, and especially with this wild music it took time for it to happen.”
The founder and director of the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival, Urs Röllin, first saw Schweizer playing with Pierre Favre in the Kammgarn. “It really made an impression on me. I almost couldn’t believe that she was from Schaffhausen. At that time I was in my early twenties, the Kammgarn was full, and I couldn’t make head or tail of free improvisation. In those days I was still listening to Led Zeppelin. I was at the concert with my girlfriend at the time and when, on a Sunday, we were invited to lunch at her parents’ place, I told them about this concert. My girlfriend came from a very musical family, and when I told them about Irène Schweizer her mother said ‘yes, we lived next to her upstairs.’ The mother was an organist in the church and was musically very talented, but then she added ‘but Irène can’t play piano. She always practiced the same thing, hundreds of times. I could’ve played it after playing through it once or twice. But she would practice the same passage over and over, I didn’t understand it.’ That was my first encounter with Irène Schweizer. I didn’t understand the mother’s criticism at all. I myself practiced guitar like that; I learned blues solos by ear and repeated them hundreds of times. When she said that I knew these were two different worlds.”
“That repressed attitude is also typical for Schaffhausen. Classical musicians who just go to their music lessons don’t understand when someone repeats the same piece hundreds of times. But working on nuances is actually the key to music. Sometimes you sense that Irène is concealing something, that she doesn’t want to be noticed. But when she is with other musicians, she’s completely different. Maybe Irène doesn’t want to be recognized on the street, but in the important places, people know who she is. It’s really a great development that neither the city nor the canton, nor the people who have to do with culture, have the slightest doubt that she has made a truly great career. Irène was already well known; even in Schaffhausen she won prizes. But of course there were also people in Schaffhausen who made fun of her